Tapping Hitler's Generals

PREFACE

The secret British transcripts of German prisoners of war have proven to be an extraordinarily rich source of research material on the Wehrmacht. These transcripts were presented to the public for the first time in a comprehensive manner in the German edition, Abgehört (2005). The study appeared initially in German and was then translated into five languages,[a] including the English edition, Tapping Hitler’s Generals, which was published in 2007.

In Germany, the book has been received with great interest by both scholars and the broad public, resulting in two hardcover and six paperback editions. The conversations about war crimes, the war of annihilation, and what soldiers knew about the Holocaust aroused particular interest: Spiegel’s headline was ‘Bestien beim Beichten’ (‘Beasts in the Confessional’), the Bildzeitung described them as ‘Abhörprotokollen des Grauens’ (‘secret transcripts of horror’), and in the Welt am Sonntag, the famous German literary critic Fritz Raddatz wrote about ‘Ansichten einiger Clowns’ (‘statements of various clowns’) and gave vent to all of his hatred for the generals of the Wehrmacht.

Statements from right-wing extremists represent the other end of the spectrum. The weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit contested the value of the transcripts, claiming that because the recorded discussions were facilitated by stool pigeons, and because the generals must have known without a doubt that they were being bugged, they intentionally gave false information. The original recordings no longer exist, making it impossible to confirm the authenticity of the transcripts, leading Junge Freiheit to claim that these transcripts are nearly worthless as a source. In internet forums, there have even been assertions that the transcripts are forgeries. Timo von Choltitz, the son of Dietrich von Choltitz, one of the generals mentioned in Tapping Hitler’s Generals, even had the Stuttgart state office of criminal investigation analyse the typefaces of the transcripts to confirm his suspicion that they were a fake. The examination of course did not reveal any irregularities – yet he continues to believe that the transcripts are forged.

Another commentator wrote on the internet: ‘Neitzel is one of those innumerable biased assembly-line scribes, of the kind that I met enough of at university, who unfortunately constitute the majority of Germany’s popular educators – that’s all you really need to know.’ Reactions of this kind illustrate that, despite the passing of the eyewitness generation, there is still an apologetic trend in Germany that finds its voice first and foremost in the new media. Of course the size of this scene cannot be estimated because it neither participates in scholarly discourse nor does it have access to the mainstream media. We certainly cannot disregard statements of this kind merely because they do not appear in the established media; nevertheless, we should also not overstate their impact. The myth of the clean Wehrmacht was destroyed long before the publication of Abgehört – a fact of which the international community is often not aware.

Reducing the Wehrmacht to crime and murder, or simply ignoring such topics, clearly does not contribute to the propagation of scholarly knowledge and often says more about the author than about the historical subject at hand. Such arguments do, however, emphasise once more how emotional debates in Germany are today, almost seventy years after the end of World War II, even if the controversy unleashed by the ‘Verbrechen der Wehrmacht’ (‘Crimes of the German Wehrmacht’) exhibition in the 1990s has calmed down in the meantime.

Scholars also received Abgehört with a great deal of interest, and the focus here was also on the chapter on crimes. The other aspects of the study – such as perceptions of Hitler and National Socialism in general, the 20 July attempt on Hitler’s life, or the question of whether and when the captured German generals wanted to collaborate with the British – received significantly less attention.

It is therefore all the more pleasing that the transcripts were able to inspire a broad debate about Erwin Rommel and the resistance against Hitler. A new feature film on Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was aired on German television (ARD) on 1 November 2011. This led to a larger discussion of the question of whether Rommel knew about the attempt on Hitler’s life and had endorsed it, making him a resistance fighter at the last minute. In Trent Park, General Heinrich Eberbach spoke several times of his conversation with Rommel on 17 July 1944, when Rommel revealed to Eberbach that Hitler had to be killed. This conversation is particularly valuable because Eberbach was the last person to speak with Rommel before he was severely wounded in the late afternoon of 17 July 1944, and Eberbach related his impressions just seven weeks later in Trent Park. Even if we cannot prove with ultimate certainty that Rommel was aware of the assassination plot, these transcripts provide strong evidence that he was one of the insiders in July 1944.

This example shows yet again that the transcripts are a quite ambivalent source that is not completely without its problems. With careful contextualisation and comparison with other documents, however, they can lead to far-reaching new findings and the reevaluation of interpretations that have become all too cherished. The transcripts published in Tapping Hitler’s Generals have thus demonstrated with a clarity that has to date not been surpassed, to return once again to the study’s core aspect, that German generals perceived the war in very different ways. Although they were all part of the same functional elite, had gone through very similar careers, hailed from a similar social environment and had had very similar experiences on the front, they had widely divergent views on National Socialism, Hitler, the course of the war and the crimes committed in it.

This fragmentation of perceptions is epitomised by the dispute between the generals Ludwig Crüwell and Wilhlem Ritter von Thoma, who fought with one another for more than one and a half years in Trent Park. Both were born in the early 1890s, fought as young infantry officers in World War I, commanded Panzer divisions on the Eastern Front in 1941, and rose to become commanders-in-chief of the German Africa Corps. And yet they had completely different interpretations of their experiences. While Crüwell staunchly believed in National Socialism, Thoma was violently anti-Nazi. Tobias Seidl, in his PhD thesis at the University of Mainz, has conducted a comprehensive examination of the heterogeneity of the generals in Trent Park and further differentiated them from one another. His study confirms the main finding that one may speak of homogeneity in terms of the actions taken by German generals, yet not with regard to their perceptions and interpretations.[b]

In comparison to Germany, reactions to Tapping Hitler’s Generals in Great Britain and the USA were significantly more objective among the broader public. There were no accusations of revisionism from these quarters, nor any suspicion that the sources could have been forged. The generally more sober response may have to do with the fact that the book was received, especially in Great Britain, by an audience interested in scholarship.

The publication of a selected number of transcripts of German generals was, of course, merely the first step in the evaluation of a total inventory of about 50,000 pages of secret transcripts of German and Italian soldiers held by the British. In 2006, I also discovered an even larger archive of surveillance documents of American provenance. The US intelligence services eavesdropped on 3,000 German soldiers held in Fort Hunt near Washington D.C., from 1942 to 1945. A total of 102,000 pages of interrogation reports, CVs and secret transcripts have been handed down. In order to assess the British and American material, the social psychologist Harald Welzer and I started a project (‘Reference frames of war’) funded by the Gerda Henkel and Fritz Thyssen Foundations. By the end of 2011, four post-docs, three PhD candidates and eleven masters’ students had researched the material systematically and from different perspectives. The project has resulted thus far in six monographs, an anthology and numerous scholarly articles.[c] Furthermore, we are cooperating with a similarly situated research project at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Historical Social Sciences in Vienna, which is performing research on the attitudes of Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers. There is also a dissertation that illuminates the role of British human intelligence in World War II, which will determine the value of the bugged holding facility in the overall system of Allied intelligence architecture.[d]

The objective of the research project was to reconstruct the frame of reference of German and Italian soldiers, thereby demonstrating how the experience of war was perceived and interpreted by a cross-section of soldiers from the Axis powers. Harald Welzer and I published the project’s first book in April 2011, Soldaten: Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben, which has been translated into nineteen languages and appeared in English in September 2012.[‡] While Tapping Hitler’s Generals was dedicated ‘solely’ to material from the higher echelons of the Wehrmacht leadership, Soldaten assesses the entire inventory of sources and attempts to concentrate on ordinary men. The study reveals the extremely limited horizon for reflection among soldiers, their enthusiasm for technology, the perception of war as a kind of work that one simply had to get done, the rapid acclimatisation to mass violence, and finally the enjoyment of committing violent acts. We document once more the widespread knowledge of all kinds of war crimes, as well as outrage over the Holocaust and the mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war.

The study makes it clear that the great mass of Wehrmacht soldiers were not interested in politics, that politics did not shape perception among the soldiers, and that ideology played at most a subordinate role in the consciousness of most Wehrmacht soldiers. Of course, German soldiers did not exist in a vacuum during the Third Reich – they were part of National Socialist society, accepting and shaping its social framework. Soldaten elucidates, however, that the degree to which specific National Socialist values can be traced to their frames of reference was limited, at least in the second half of the war. We do not doubt that there was a hard core of soldiers who combined set pieces of Nazi ideology into a more or less self-contained understanding of the world. And we also point out that ideologised soldiers were found with particular frequency in the Waffen-SS or in the elite units of the Wehrmacht. Soldaten therefore does not completely neglect the influence of ideology on action or the perceptions of simple soldiers, but it does seek to relativise them significantly. Practically everyone was certainly loyal to the Nazi state, and, of course, this cannot be confused with a crude ideologisation. Most of them may not have seen at the time what we see today in the Nazi state, yet they certainly perceived a distorted image. It is also interesting that soldiers made a distinction between Hitler and the Nazi regime; for most of them, Hitler was a sort of pater patriae, not the National Socialist ‘Führer’ who was responsible for war, murder and war crimes.

Many soldiers indeed were anti-Semites and anti-communists, which definitely made it easier for them to pledge their loyalty to the Nazi state. The critical fact remains, however, that their perception of war, their interpretation of events, their expectations for the future and so on were not determined primarily by political or ideological patterns or set pieces in the narrower sense, but rather by their experiences on the front, of the battles in which they found themselves. This is why approval of the Nazi state changed significantly as the defeats began to occur. Their loyalty to their nation, and above all to the institution of the Wehrmacht, remained unbroken. And this was the actual secret of the Nazi state: the loyalty of the soldiers to the Wehrmacht was absolutely unshakeable because they viewed it as an efficient and successful organisation in which they could fulfil their duty for the Fatherland, regardless of social class or political conviction. Yet many soldiers did not see this during the war – even if this may strike us as astonishing today.

Soldaten therefore goes against Omar Bartov’s thesis of the National Socialist infiltration of Wehrmacht soldiers. And it relativises the concept of the Volksgemeinschaft (national community), at least in its most extreme manifestation, as Thomas Kühne recently argued.[e] Kühne’s thesis is that the exclusion of the Jews from German society, and their murder, was a decisive factor in creating the national community. The creation of this community was therefore achieved through crimes (in both the narrow and broad sense of the term), because these performed an integrating social function. Mass murder, according to Kühne, bestowed a feeling of identity sui generis upon the national community as a whole in the Third Reich. The claim here is that the Nazi state successfully overcame societal rifts qua crimes. Perpetrator research has in fact shown how groups are constituted and consolidated as communities in and through the act of mass murder (culture of participation, outsiders play a key role for the inner differentiation of the group).

Whether the creation of community through mass crimes – above all through the Holocaust – united Germans as a whole seems, however, a questionable argument in light of the research results from Soldaten, because the group of perpetrators directly involved in these crimes is too small, knowledge of it was too diffuse among too many people, and this line of thinking was not in the front and centre of their perceptions. The idea of creating a community through a broadly understood meaning of crime seems problematic, even if we add the murder of civilians in the hinterlands in the course of the partisan war, or Soviet prisoners of war, and if we look at the Wehrmacht instead of the entire German people. For members of the Wehrmacht, their perceptions of war were shaped indelibly by their everyday experiences at the front from 1939 to 1945: overwhelming sensory impressions of battle, privations, fear, joy, waiting, free time, gossip and chin-wagging, enthusiasm for technology etc. These experiences certainly included war crimes, as the transcripts make abundantly clear.

Interestingly, however, acts of violence that we would clearly define today as crimes and transgressions of the norm were often simply not perceived by soldiers as such, and therefore could not have created a sense of solidarity: the experience of extreme violence on a daily basis, plundering, forced labour by civilians, rapes, even scorched earth and executions often seemed little more than events that one need not worry about, because they were so pervasive and completely normal. This just seemed what war was supposed to be about.

In the secretly taped conversations of German soldiers, they described Allied carpet bombing of German cities as a terrible yet ‘normal’ act of violence in this kind of war, not as a crime. Massacres of Jews and the murder of Soviet prisoners of war were certainly appraised differently – namely, as a horrible crime. The soldiers, however, did not draw any further conclusions from such acts of violence and did not question the war, the Wehrmacht or even the state. Crimes occupied a central role in the interpretations of a very limited few, displacing a positive self-understanding and instigating something like long-term shame. Like in other social communities, Wehrmacht soldiers developed an astonishing capacity for blocking out unpleasantness, dismissing such occurrences as isolated cases or somehow recasting the event to prevent calling their world view into question.

It is certainly right to focus contemporary research on the crimes of the Wehrmacht, yet we cannot commit the error of analytical narrowness, confusing what we hold to be a central feature of war with what the soldiers perceived as central to war. Crimes were not the central concern of contemporary perception among Wehrmacht soldiers – and the Holocaust was most definitely not.

Soldaten became a bestseller in Germany just a few days after its publication, and it has been discussed from the USA to Australia. Interestingly, the book’s actual findings have scarcely been appreciated, especially outside Germany. What seemed most spectacular was the nonchalance in speaking about violence, the brutality of the language, the joy of killing. It seemed that once more we had proof of how horrible the Wehrmacht had been and in fact was, yet this has been known for a long time. The brutality in itself is therefore not the essential point; instead, it is the matter-of-course, everyday normality of this brutality – and above all the timelessness of speaking about war in this way. This phenomenon is by no means limited solely to the Wehrmacht: it involves adjustment within the shortest period of time to the frame of reference of war and the consideration as completely normal of things that, in civilian life, we would interpret as revolting, horrible or even criminal.

Many readers outside Germany found it difficult to follow this interpretation of the Wehrmacht; indeed, they found it difficult to follow any analysis at all. Some expressed regret that Soldaten was not just another set of published transcripts. In the final analysis, some believed that the authors’ analysis could be safely ignored, because people already knew everything about the reasons for the actions of the Nazi Wehrmacht.

The transcripts offer a major opportunity to research the complexity of mentalities, in this case of Wehrmacht soldiers. Normative approaches that intend only to confirm previously existing opinions will not bring about any advances in knowledge. So let us not deprive these sources of their complex, contradictory character. And let us ask ourselves above all what commonalities and differences there are between Wehrmacht soldiers and the armies of other times and other countries.